Reflections of an American Expat on Canada Day Weekend

Since moving to Canada 11 years ago, I have continually been surprised by the subtle differences between what is valued and rewarded here – and what is discouraged and shunned – compared to the United States in which I grew up.

I grew up in university towns on the West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest US, in addition to 18 months of elementary school in Germany. In all the school institutions I encountered, an often spoken and never challenged value was that of striving for and rewarding excellence: The unusually creative kid, the academic genius or hardest worker, and the nascent natural leader were spotted and rewarded for their talents and merit, encouraged and cheered to fly higher – the sky was the limit! Thinking outside the box and challenging each other’s assumptions and viewpoints – even if the other was a teacher or an authority figure – was generally applauded if those challenges encouraged others to think more deeply, understand better, and generated useful or interesting novelty in thought or process.

These values were ensconced in me – and in my husband from Texas – when we moved from Berkeley California to Toronto Ontario with our 8-month old daughter. In addition to receiving good job offers, we were attracted to many overtly superior aspects of Canada: Its relative safety, equality, and social infrastructure, including good public schools and universal health care. We left the grit and violence of the East Bay, which existed blocks away from gourmet restaurants and boutiques the dot-com millionaires and intellectual elite traveled to through segregated neighborhoods in fancy cars, to a city in which it felt safe to walk anywhere, anytime, and had a vibe of integrated diversity and neighborly tolerance, if not love.

Yet subtle differences quickly greeted us in our places of work and in the educational institutions we encountered through our children a few years later. Whereas disagreeing with senior colleagues at Berkeley (and Illinois and Princeton) earned one respect if one’s views and arguments had merit, such behavior at Toronto often labeled one a trouble-maker to be shunned and avoided. In the US, disagreement was generally voiced openly: You knew where people stood. It gave you the opportunity to understand the other’s viewpoint and work through your own explanations. Relationships of mutual respect often resulted.

In Canada, disagreement seems most often to come in the form of silence, which, to a naïve American, might take a long time to catch on to and figure out. More explicit reactions can involve shaming or embarrassing the speaker. Whereas suggestions for improvement and offering new ideas were generally greeted in the US with paused thought and an “aha! – we could also…,” or, “maybe, but it might not work because,” in Canada new suggestions and ideas have often resulted in puzzled looks, being ignored, being told “that’s not how it’s done,” or even having one’s motives questioned.

After committing several unwitting offences at work, I got the message to quiet down, go with the flow, and speak up only when I could not bear to remain silent. There are some nice things about this: I don’t have to worry about most decisions in my department because others more senior, or those willing to go along with them, make them for the rest of us. I am free to concentrate on my own niche of work and pursue what I love most: my research and teaching. I began to appreciate a different way of doing things that had both pros and cons to it: More politeness and civility, less overt conflict, and more of a paternalistic than an opportunistic exercise of power.

Where my discomfort and inability to adapt became most apparent, however, was with the rearing and rewarding of the young. I suppose that is where most culture clashes take place, given that culture is defined and transmitted through the next generation. Differences in values became apparent early in the way I approached training graduate students, which differed from the way most of my colleagues did. This led to confusion and conflict, as within a family whose parents have fundamentally different assumptions and values.

At one point my husband and I changed schools for our children, from one highly regarded by the surrounding community to one that fit better with our own educational values – not surprisingly, near the university and full of American families. Yet even there we were often surprised, a decade into our Canadianization, by what did – and did not – earn reward and recognition. Need for recognition, and the positive impact it might have on a child, seemed as or more important than performance itself. A Canadian colleague said the schools try to level the playing field by rewarding hard workers who need a boost of confidence. A colleague from China told me that Chinese schools make awards based on who one’s father is.

What a culture officially rewards in its young – and old – explicitly communicates the goals and values that more subtle social reactions implicitly do: Whether the culture most values equality or excellence; whether it is more important to seek safety or to advance new ideas; whether the focus is on short-term or on long-term goals, on the individual or the group. The innovation gap between the US and Canada might be explained by differences in these goals and values; so might the difference in their levels of social mobility and equality.

I’m still more comfortable with the cultural values I grew up with, and am proud of what the US has uniquely invented and achieved in the world. I also see the limits of valuing excellence and growth above all else and its potential harm to social peace and the long-term stability of a society. I prefer to live in Canada and am slowly beginning to see the merit in a subtly different lens. But I think I will always experience this cultural struggle, and hope it continues to open my mind and strengthen my heart.